0.1 After "words"  (Page 3/8)

Brown's work in publishing and printing and voluminous writing made one line of the opening poem in Words a coda of his life: "words and I are one." He also includes a visual mathematic formula as part of the poem, suggesting aquantifiable and scientific description of the merger of poet and words rather than a mawkish metaphor of two people merging in love.

Cunard always printed in the serif Caslon Old Face type on the heavy Vergé de Rives paper, both of which she acquired in"generous amount" when she purchased a 200-year–old hand-press from Bill Bird, whose Three Mountain Press had already published modernist poets Ezra Pound,Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and others (Ford, Hours , xii). With her press, inks, paper and type, Cunard quickly established a look for all of the books she published, and shealso commissioned covers by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Georges Sadoul, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Elliott Seabrooke, and Len Lye.

Brown's project would throw a wrench into that tidy process and house style. Although Cunard had hoped to design the bindingfor Words as "a reproduction of a large slab of old ivory, the veining standing out dark on the printed surface, thisturned out to be too difficult; the reproduction would not have been sharp enough. So the covers are cream paper boards with a red leather spine”( Hours , 182). The cover design by John Sibthorpe, perhaps the only element that went off as planned, resembles atypewriter poem from the 1950s and 1960s rather than a modernist printing exercise.

No one involved in the project ever thought to give the book’s miniature font a name, since it was a one-off, not produced asmoveable type and never used again. The microscopic text might be categorized as an illustration of printed letters or a visual poem about microscopic printingrather than a traditional font or typeface. It seems appropriate, in the context of this reissue of Words , to name this font "Bobbed Brown Condensed," after Gertrude Stein’s appellation “BobbedBrown”—her witty allusion to Brown’s call in his Readies manifesto to process all texts in a telegraphic cut-up style eliminating all unnecessary words.

The microscopic text, "too small to be read without a magnifying glass" or without using a variant of Brown's proposedreading machine, "strained the ingenuity and perseverance" of the Press's management when they sought type small enough for the micrographic poems (Ford, Published in Paris , 286). The "only solution, a costly one, was to print the miniature poems from specially engravedplates, the whole to measure not more than one-eighth of an inch when completed" ( Published in Paris , 287). For Cunard, the project served as "an excellent example of what one plans to do and howcircumstances can alter the idea. Many attempts were made to get really microscopic type" ( Published in Paris , 183). The originally planned heavy paper stock would not work with themicroscopic text that tended to blur as it imprinted in the rougher paper; theysubstituted a different, smoother, paper stock called Canson-Montgolfier to get a crisp, rather than luxurious, print. The efforts to engrave the copper platesand relief-print the text produced mixed results, with many letters either appearing—even with magnification—as dots, smudges, or typed over.